Nod (8 page)

* * *

When we were about halfway back to our apartment, we came upon a crowd surrounding a woman standing atop a concrete bench in the middle of one of those tiny roundabouts the city installed back in the 1980s to slow traffic and dissuade johns from cruising for hookers.

‘I know how to sleep!’ the woman cried. ‘I know!’

She was in her forties, with the look of someone grown thin and old waiting for something that she’d known all along was never really going to come her way. Even if nothing was coming, you still had to wait: those were the rules. And if you were waiting anyway, you inevitably ended up pretending that your vigil wasn’t really in vain. To salvage a little dignity. And besides, maybe if you faked it long enough, you’d get lucky and hope would pop up like a morning mushroom on a dewy morning, suddenly whole and instantly there. No one could really say it was impossible, not really. No one knew for sure.

Anyway, this woman had grown tired long before the world ended: I could see it in her anonymous hair colour, in the way her jeans fit, in the list of her shoulders.

Her audience pressed close, trampling the ranks of city tulips festooning the roundabout.

‘I know how!’

No one believed she knew anything. Her eyes were too red and raw for her to be in possession of some magical sleep recipe, but the crowd seemed willing, for now, to go along with the charade. With TV over, they were here for the freak show.

She swept out a knife and held it high. I looked around for a cop, but we hadn’t seen one all morning. Just an abandoned uniform in a heap on a bench.

‘This is how!’ she cried, then took the long thin blade, held it toward her wide open right eye with one hand, then reached out and slammed the palm of her other hand into its base, driving the blade in to the hilt.

The crowd dilated spasmodically as the woman fell, a dropped doll.

What was left laying there mid-roundabout
did
look a lot like sleep. She lay on her back, the smooth wooden handle of the knife pointing straight up from her face like the gnomon on a sundial. No blood just yet, just a little clear liquid running down one cheek like a tear. Soon ravens would come and be unkind to her.

The crowd kept spreading; I grabbed Tanya’s arm and pulled her along as fast as I could manage, trying to stay ahead of its thinning perimeter.

‘I won’t tell anyone, Paul,’ she announced suddenly, in a tattletale voice. And then she was angry. ‘Don’t be so fucking paranoid!’

Several stragglers looked our way, but we looked mad enough together, and any kindling suspicions soon evaporated.

* * *

A block from our apartment, two blocks from Stanley Park, a shocking sight. Five children stood clustered together on the sidewalk. Children like from before, not like the ones we’d seen all morning lurking in alleys, crouched and lidless with terror. These ones were smiling, just like the boy in the ER and the little girl behind the Safeway. A little grubby, but otherwise they appeared unaffected by the chaos.

Tanya and I stopped in our tracks, like record player needles when a late-afternoon storm hits and the power goes out. In the ensuing silence, the children nudged one another.

‘Who are they?’ Tanya asked in wonder, briefly emerging from her fog.

‘I’ve no idea.’

The oldest was a girl of around ten who wore a T-shirt and pink shorts. The youngest was a boy with longish blonde bangs who couldn’t have been more than two. He held the older girl’s hand and stared shyly at me. These were fellow Sleepers, clear-eyed and unconcerned. As we stood facing one another in our aquarium of silence, the oldest girl kept looking toward a row of shrubs that stood outside a stucco Vancouver-as-California condominium complex.

I cleared my throat.

‘Are you okay?’

The other four looked to the oldest girl, who stared at me for them all.

‘Can I—?’ I began, but they turned and ran, fluttering down the sidewalk toward the park and the slow-waving willows that ringed the perimeter.

Across the street, a young man with no shirt and tangled black hair raised a quivering arm in the direction of the children’s flight, looked in our direction, and opened his mouth silently. Then he turned and began to plod after them, but much too slowly to ever catch up.

Then a sound from behind the scraggly row of shrubs that had attracted the children’s attention: giggling.

* * *

The little girl we discovered playing hide-and-seek behind the shrubs wouldn’t tell us her name; like the other children, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She wasn’t silent in a war-traumatized way, but in a shrugging, nothing-much-to-say manner. A pretty little thing, around four years old, with blonde hair and a wide brow—Alice In Wonderland-ish. She returned our smiles and didn’t flinch from Tanya’s touch when she picked her up.

When we got her home, placed her on the couch and began to pelt her with questions, she simply replied with a bemused tilt of her head. It was as though our enquiries about names and the whereabouts of mommies and daddies weren’t quite up to snuff, but she was too well-mannered to tell us.

We called her Zoe, Tanya having plucked the name from a mental list of future-children names that women seem to carry around inside themselves like eggs. Women. Eggs in their bodies, babies in their eyes.

From the moment we’d peered over the hedge and seen Zoe bouncing a small pink ball on the fractured concrete, Tanya had taken fevered possession of her. She scooped her up and marched the final block to our apartment without waiting for me. As I followed, Zoe watched me, her round face bobbing sombrely on Tanya’s left shoulder. The feeling that we were living out our lives together in fast forward was intensified by our sudden acquisition of a foster child.

‘Well, if you won’t speak, little missy, maybe you’ll eat!’ Tanya said, a little too brightly, her haggard face working up to a smile.

She emptied the cupboards, lining up our twin jars of tahini, a jumbo box of Corn Flakes, dandruff-y carrots, bread, and apples on the breakfast bar. The child hopped off the couch, ambled over, and picked up the box of cereal which she proceeded to shake like a giant, ungainly maraca.

‘So you like Corn Flakes, do you?’ Tanya asked, then headed over to the fridge and removed our last jug of milk. She opened it and sniffed, screwed up her face in disgust, then brought out a box of granola bars instead.

As Zoe munched away happily, Tanya came and sat down beside me. I put my arm around her. She flinched and began to pull away, but then something changed and she snuggled in toward me.

‘It’s almost like she’s ours, Paul.’

‘Almost,’ I replied, not liking the direction Tanya was taking this.

‘Do you think we would have had a family?’

‘Don’t say “would have”.’

She sighed in exasperation but didn’t pull away. ‘I don’t know if we would have. Do you think we would have stayed together and got married?’

‘I would have married you, even if I had to do it on my own.’ It was a feeble attempt at wit, but it worked. She giggled and swung her legs up onto my lap.

‘Maybe I would have married you. You’re pretty cute. Especially when you’re being all serious and writerly. That’s when you’re at your silliest, Paul. Do you know that?’

‘Now I know you’re going crazy.’

Tanya leaned in and gave me a hot kiss under my jaw, on my jugular.

‘I love you.’

‘Love you too, Paul. You would have been worth marrying. Me not so much, maybe.’

‘Don’t be—’ but she hushed me and we sat together in silence as Zoe, our truncated hypothetical future, munched away. That was the last real conversation we ever had, and I’ll take it with me as far down this road as I end up travelling.

* * *

When it got dark, we lit candles. They didn’t help the weirded-out atmosphere. Coupled with the screaming and smashing sounds from out on the streets, the twitchy yellow light only served to make our apartment seem like the den of some urban Satanist. When she could wriggle free of Tanya’s hugging arms for a few minutes, Zoe entertained herself by silently wafting her hands back and forth across the flames. Eventually we managed to persuade Zoe to blow out the candles and two thirds of us called it a night. Tanya put Zoe to sleep in our bed, I crashed on the sofa, while Tanya sat in the dark and waited for dawn.

At about four in the morning I was awakened by the sound of someone shouldering the front door. I ran out into the hall and found Tanya already there, flat against the wall with our longest, pointiest kitchen knife clutched in her right hand. We stood there for a few moments until the banging stopped. Voices were raised in dispute, something got slammed on the ground, then footsteps and hawing voices echoed down the hall.

A butcher who dresses in blue to conceal blood-stains.

At dawn, the sky cracked open and daylight spilled all over our ravaged City of Destruction. Armless birdsong, audible through closed windows, made the worm of devastation even harder to swallow.

A strangely domestic scene that morning. Tanya was her old self, or might have appeared so to a casual observer. Like an alcoholic hot on the trail of some new resolve, she’d washed and applied makeup and was cheerfully tending to Zoe’s needs, washing and cleaning, playing and feeding, all the while chatting to me or speaking to the silent child in a high, girlish voice, the kind of tone people who aren’t good with kids use when trying to be good with kids. The kind of voice I always suspect kids can see through. Was Tanya good with kids? I had no idea. Even though we’d been together for over three years, our shared moments around the young had been limited to brief encounters with colleagues’ offspring as they were introduced at dinner parties or barbeques before being shuffled back off to their segregated kiddie-kingdoms.

Zoe didn’t seem to mind, seemed to assume that she and Tanya were just playing a pickup game of mother-daughter pretend. But Tanya wasn’t playing: she was brushing Zoe’s hair in deadly earnest: gentle with the tangles but obviously fighting the urge to pull and tear. For my part, I sat on the couch and kept watch in case she lost it.

What must it have been like, I wonder now, to have been the only person in the room that morning taking their role in our pretend family seriously? On some level, Tanya must have known that Zoe wasn’t really charmed by her exertions, and that I wasn’t really onside. On some level, it must have really hurt.

‘Paul?’

‘Yeah?’

‘We should take Zoe out for breakfast when I’ve done with her hair. Show her our Breakfastery-That-Must-Remain-Nameless.’

‘I don’t think that’s doable, Tanya.’

She slapped her cheek, shook her head and laughed. ‘Oh, right. Wow. Of course not. Christ.’ Then, without missing a beat, ‘So what do you have going on today?’

‘We should try to find Zoe’s parents, but I haven’t got a clue how to go about it if she’s not going to talk to us.’

‘Parents?’

As though on cue, Zoe turned and smiled through me, then went back to brushing the stuffed grizzly bear Tanya had given her the night before, retrieved from a small stash of childhood stuffies she kept in the bedroom closet. Tanya brushing Zoe brushing the grizzly.

After a while she put down her hairbrush and smiled. ‘Paul? You know what I just remembered?’

‘What?’

‘That time we went river rafting at Hell’s Gate? Remember how we were pretending to be so nervous? You said you wondered if it really was the gate to Hell and when we came out on the other end we were there, even if everything looked like normal?’

‘Remember the drive home?’

She left Zoe to her bear and came and snuggled up, rubbing her bristly left calf against my thigh.

‘We passed the Hell Shell gas station…’

‘And the Denny’s of the Damned and the Infernal Ikea. I remember.’

‘That was a really fun day.’

‘A hell of a day.’

She looked briefly at me, then down at her lap, her smile fading. My arm was around her shoulder, but I could feel her grow distant again and soon enough she wriggled free and went back over to Zoe and resumed brushing.

I turned on my laptop. (charge remaining: 18%) and tried to locate a network. No luck. A laptop is a pretty stupid thing to own when the Web is down. I could have played Minesweeper or tapped away at my manuscript until the battery gave out, I suppose, but those were the sum total of my options. Beyond that, my almost-new $3000 MacBook Air might have functioned—very briefly—as a campfire waffle iron or a fairly lame frisbee.

I tried to make eye contact with Tanya, but she glared at me, hundred-proof hatred pouring from her eyes. So while her unsteady hands plied Zoe with dry Corn Flakes and brownish apple slices, I sat straight-legged on the balcony in a sliver of sun and tried to make my thoughts make sense. Tried to
make sense
; tried to manufacture it. My head a little factory, chug-chug-chugging away.

How to break down what was happening? Some children were sleeping, some weren’t. Same for the grownups. The non-Sleepers, child and adult alike, were straightforward in their blossoming psychoses. But there was clearly a difference between the way child and adult Sleepers were handling things.